AN IMPORTANT U.S. ARMY general was kidnapped in Italy by the Red Brigades terrorists. The U.S. government pulled out all the stops, shook up every intelligence source, scanned every photo, but had no luck locating the general.
The government turned to the ghost-finders - an ultrasecret psychic unit run by the Army under the code name "Project Grill Flame." Three different psychics turned their "remote viewing" vision to find Brig. Gen. James Dozier before he could be killed by the brutal terrorists in late 1981.One remote viewer, Joe McMoneagle, was particularly successful. He zeroed in on the room where Dozier was held, chained to a wall heater. He described it, but couldn't get the house number. Yet he did get the location - the Italian city of Padua.
The information was slowly sent up the chain of command, and finally arrived on the right desk. But it didn't arrive until a day after Dozier was released - in Padua - in early 1982.
Some of these events are noted in a highly sensitive secret log that recorded the unit's activities from 1979 to 1989, which was obtained by our associate Dale Van Atta. In the Dozier case, Project No. 8125, it is noted that McMoneagle "provided `Padua' eight days before (Dozier's) release." The log further brags that "all other info was confirmed during a debriefing conducted by project personnel."
What becomes clear from reading the log is that the psychic spy unit, which cost $20 million to operate, worked mainly as a missing persons bureau. And while the log indicates that the unit had several psychic "hits," the information never led to the recovery of a single missing person.
No problem ever took more of the unit's time than the Iran hostage crisis. The Joint Chiefs of Staff called in the psychics on Nov. 23, 1979, and a total of 206 sessions were held to try to determine the location and condition of the hostages.
During that time, the psychics revealed some information that later turned out to be true - such as a description of the location and uniforms of the guards, and the fact that one of the hostages was in a poor mental state and probably suffering from multiple sclerosis. Still, their efforts played no role in the release of the hostages in 1981.
The second most time-consuming project, conducted after the unit was shifted to the Defense Intelligence Agency, was a search for American hostages held in Lebanon in the late 1980s involving six psychics.
In the case of Marine Corps Col. William Higgins, the psychics cited a specific building in a south Lebanese village where he had been held - and another hostage later confirmed that Higgins had probably been in the building at the time of the "remote viewing" sessions. The psychics also accurately said that Higgins had been killed at a time when other U.S. intelligence suggested he was alive.
Some projects recorded in the log were abject failures. In two different 1981 sessions, for example, the unit tried to locate American soldiers missing from the Vietnam War. But none of the information could be confirmed, and the log notes that the sessions were "not helpful."
But in the case of a dangerous fugitive, Charles Jordan, psychics were far more successful. On the lam for two years, Jordan was found where a psychic said he'd be - in Wyoming hiding at a campground near an American Indian burial site.